When webs of material are typically processed industrially, they are usually unwound from a roll and subjected to various processing and finishing operations and then rewound on a roll to be shipped out as a product. However, the overall speed and efficiency at which the web of material is processed is limited by the slowest processing step.
Discontinuous manufacturing processes for rolled goods are well known in the art. These discontinuous processes have the advantages of being able to isolate sub-processes at decoupled stations with dissimilar production speed limitations and enable each decoupled station to perform at its highest efficiency rates, without being subject to the limitations of the other related decoupled processing stations. However, these conventional discontinuous printing processes have an inherent limitation in their ability to facilitate the production of small, customized batch orders. In these situations, the higher processing speeds of secondary or finishing manufacturing processes do not facilitate the rapid differentiation and finishing sub-processes of small, customizable batch orders without operator inspection and manual processing changes.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a discontinuous manufacturing process in which a unique indicator code is placed on a web of material during a first processing stage. The indicator code provides data about a batch order which facilitates the efficient output of the secondary finishing process steps at rates higher than commonly achieved with a manual inspection process.